HP SAS Expander Wiki

I have several of these bad boys. Will attempt to flash when I get home. Thanks for the writeup. I even went as far as buying a p410 on eBay just to flash. I had no idea you could flash without one.

 

Matt,

I'm afraid I can't really help much. I only had the one card to flash and I didn't have any issues. The only thing I see that is different between your experience and mine is I started with FW 2.06 and used ubuntu 14. You might want to try ubuntu 14, if we can get enough people posting their results we can eventually put together definitive how to on flashing these things without HP Raid card.

EDIT: One more thing to check is I had a single SAS cable plugged into the port labeled backplane. Also there is a note on the other forum where one person flashed their card and it did not increase rev number but started negotiating SATA at 3GB. You might want to try plugging in drive to see what link negotiates at.

 

Drives appear to negotiate at 3.0Gbps, which is good.

However, I wonder whethe same thing is what is causing Windows Server 2012R2 to not be able to toggle the drive lights (Failed to toggle drive light: Not Supported)

 

Hello All,

New forum user here; current HP Expander card user also.

I am wondering if anyone has had this type of issue.

I have an Avago / LSI SAS 9201-8i raid card flashed to latest IT-mode firmware and HP Expander card model # HSTNM-B017 firmware version 2.10. When in bios settings of raid card, all 8 drives connected to expander can be seen as online.

When booting into different Linux distros, only 1 or 2 or rarely 3 drives can be seen as online. Boot back to card bios, all drives responding perfectly.

When connected directly to raid card, all drives seen perfectly in OS.

Expander card heat sink is warm but not hot to the touch when running.

Have tried other breakout cables, 8087-to-8087 cables, and even a spare expander card with same results. I have not tried a different host raid adapter, but in the process of acquiring one.

Before purchasing another raid card, is there any particular type that might work better than the 9201? This card seems to work perfectly when not attached to the expander card, with all 8 drives.

Any insight into this issue would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers!

 

What model(s) of drive are you using? Once a friend was trying to use a bunch of different models and sizes of drive with an hp sas expander with the final firmware, and two older smaller drives just wouldn't show up through the expander, but worked fine difectly attached to the lsi controller (some sas2008 card, I forget which) with no bios on the card, so we didn't see if they were seen at boot. He ended up replacing the drives anyway, so we never found the root cause, but chalked it up to first generation sata drive quirks.

If you only have 8 drives anyway, what is your plan with the expander? (I suspect adding more drives later...)

 

You're correct, I have room for a lot more drives in future. I have a variety of drives attached, seagate 2g, wd 4g, 1 hgst 6g, 1 hgst 2g. When drives are attached to expander and system booted to OS, sometimes this or that drive will show, but vary randomly. Reboots generally show different drive(s) almost every time. Tried different OS's also, so doesn't seem to be card driver issue, especially when the card by itself shows all drives in any os.

I don't have a lot of money wrapped up in the 2 expander cards, so that's not a big deal if I can't use them. I can get a 16 port sas card if necessary, and that's the way I'm leaning right now. When the system is finalized, there will be more than 8 drives, so probably will go with something greater than 8 ports.

Would be nice to be able to utilize the expanders, but if not, oh well. Using the expanders would make for a bit more complicated system, and having something simpler would probably be better in long run.

Have a great day!

 

Well, I think I figured the HP Expander card issue out.

Set device timeout options in LSI SAS9201-8i higher than default, and all drive offline issues went away! Now to start turning each one back down one at a time, to see which one(s) actually affect the disks.

For now, seems to be running quite smoothly, even on multiple reboots. Tried different OS's also, with same good results.

Thanks all!

 

Hi, Sorry to bring up such an old thread but I do have a query for you, I have not yet installed linux on my server and am still using windblowz at the moment as I am testing drives and the Avago UI comes in handy.

What I was wanting to know is under linux with the 2.10 version firmware do you see all the drives as being on one port or do they report as cable group selections, under windows I have 16 drives connected and they all show as port 0-3 and port 4-7 Slot number 0 on my HP Sas expander FW 2.08 connected to an 9361-8i.

I don't know if the limitation on reporting the drive # as 0 and not reporting the header number is related to the SAS expander FW version or the 9361-8i. I have been told that the LSI firmware is a bit dumb when it comes to this.

Everything is working it just makes it difficult to identify a drive if it bodges out.